![]() ![]() It’s very difficult and everyone is suffering the same.” I just never imagined we would be living like this. We still have to find the money to pay for our apartment and to heat it during this past winter. ![]() “But all the prices have gone up because of the war and my husband’s salary buys less than it used to because of the falling exchange rate with the dollar. “I’m not working but my husband is,” she says. Working in retail before the war, the 30-year-old lost her job and fled with her family to Spain for six months where she burned through her savings before returning to Ukraine in the autumn. One resident of Irpin, Veronika Pravyk is looking through the clothes and trying to find free nappies and baby milk for her toddler, which are sometimes available but not today. ![]() There, on most days, about 500 people can be found queuing for a free loaf, with tables and a tent also set up outside the centre on the day the Guardian visits, offering free secondhand shoes, clothes and children’s toys. The most visible sign of the poverty crisis can be found at a protestant church in the town where priests have set up six distribution centres for free bread across the area, the busiest in Irpin itself. But while the ground war long ago receded from Irpin, the economic consequences of conflict are still being felt sharply in a town where the population has been swelled by internally displaced fleeing the frontlines in the south and east. Photograph: Peter Beaumont/The GuardianĮlsewhere damaged buildings are being repaired, cranes and work crews busy. In the town of Irpin just outside Kyiv, where heavy fighting took place at the beginning of the war as Russian armoured columns attempted to take the capital, the wrecked bridge that was used as an escape route by fleeing refugees is being rebuilt.Ī queue for free bread at a church in Irpin. Before the war my wife would go to the supermarket to shop and it would cost 200 hryvnia, now the same shop costs 400-500.”įor those in the most difficult circumstances that has meant relying on handouts, no matter how small. Food is the most expensive and then it is fuel for the car. With unemployment unofficially at 36% and inflation hitting 26.6% at the end of 2022, the institution’s regional country director for eastern Europe, Arup Banerji, had warned that poverty could soar.īehind his window in Treasure, Stepanov describes the hardships experienced even by those who have work. Poverty increased from 5.5% to 24.2% in Ukraine in 2022, pushing 7.1 million more people into poverty with the worst impact out of sight in rural villages, according to a recent report by the World Bank. The scene in the pawn shop illustrates the crisis of growing poverty in Ukraine, the reality of which stands in contrast to the surface bustle of Kyiv’s busy restaurants and bars where it is often hard to get a table, with many living a precarious existence. They don’t have money.” Many have lost their jobs, he says, while prices have skyrocketed even for those who have jobs. “People are struggling because of the war. Almost half, he adds, will not, leaving Treasure to sell on the items from a back room with displays of phones and watches. Those who can afford it, he says, will come back to get their goods within two weeks. As Oleksandra leaves clutching her belongings, save for a mobile phone she has decided not to redeem, the cashier, Oleksandr Stepanov, remarks from behind his hardened glass window that on a busy day the shop can get 50 people coming in to surrender mobile phones and household appliances. ![]()
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